Update 2025-03-09 Today I tried to install Ubuntu 24.04 again. I made a bootable USB using Rufus. Then I tried booting in both EFI and non-EFI mode. I noticed in non-EFI mode, the bootup gets stuck at:
smp: Bringing up secondary CPUs...
smpboot: x86: Booting SMP configuration:
So I searched the above messages and found this thread which suggests trying nolapic kernel parameter. So I tried it and the problem was solved! But I noticed I have one CPU after bootup. So I searched smp in the Linux kernel documentation and found this one:
maxcpus= [SMP,EARLY] Maximum number of processors that an SMP kernel
will bring up during bootup. maxcpus=n : n >= 0 limits
the kernel to bring up 'n' processors. Surely after
bootup you can bring up the other plugged cpu by executing
"echo 1 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpuX/online". So maxcpus
only takes effect during system bootup.
While n=0 is a special case, it is equivalent to "nosmp",
which also disables the IO APIC.
So I tried maxcpus=2 (my laptop has 8 logical processors and any number above 2 didn't work for me) and the system was booted successfully with two processors and the good news was that I could enable all CPUs using chcpu -e 0-7 command (echo 1 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpuX/online was giving me Permission Denied error).
Update 2024-10-15: I tried different kernels using https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/MainlineBuilds, and I can confirm that the problem starts from kernel 6.5.0. Any version above that stops booting at either Loading initial ramdisk or EFI stub: Measured initrd data into PCR 9. Using kernel 6.4.0 and below, there is no issue and Ubuntu is booted successfully, except some messages that may be helpful to find out why kernels above 6.5.0 does not work:
[ 0.076374] DMAR: [Firmware Bug]: No firmware reserved region can cover this RMRR [0x0000000078800000-0x000000007affffff], contact BIOS vendor for fixes`
[ 0.103670] x86/cpu: SGX disabled by BIOS.
[ 0.391923] tpm_crb MSFT0101:00: [Firmware Bug]: ACPI region does not cover the entire command/response buffer. [mem 0xfed40000-0xfed4087f flags 0x200] vs fed40080 f80
[ 0.391937] tpm_crb MSFT0101:00: [Firmware Bug]: ACPI region does not cover the entire command/response buffer. [mem 0xfed40000-0xfed4087f flags 0x200] vs fed40080 f80
I hope a maintainer see this post and fix it, because I cannot afford a new laptop.
Update 2024-10-14: Using Ventoy I could easily install Kubuntu 24.04.1 on my laptop. But after install I got stuck in the grub menu with the same errors described below. Then I found out adding dis_ucode_ldr to the grub's linux command as described here, solves the problem. The strange part is that Ventoy successfully boots Ubuntu from USB without any issue and without disabling the microcode (Tested as described here in the section: "Checking the microcode version of your CPU"). So I reckon the problem is not related to the microcode but related to grub.
I created a bootable USB flash drive using Startup Disk Creator. During system boot, there were two choices to boot from it: SanDisk 'Cruzer Fit and UEFI: SanDisk 'Cruzer Fit, Partition 2. Kubuntu 22.04 was already installed in UEFI mode, so I chose the second one. Before seeing the GRUB options, two errors were printed (the first rror is not a typo, it was printed without e!)
rror: file '/boot/' not found.
error: can't find command 'grub_platform'.
Then in the GRUB menu, choosing either Try or Install Ubuntu or Ubuntu (safe graphics) result in a black screen. After searching for hours I found out acpi was the culprit. So I tried disabling it by pressing c in the GRUB menu and then entering:
linux (hd0)/casper/vmlinuz root=(hd0) acpi=off
initrd (hd0)/casper/initrd
boot
The above commands without acpi=off prints:
EFI stub: Loaded initrd from LINUX_EFI_INITRD_MEDIA_GUID device path
EFI stub: Measured initrd data into PCR 9
and then nothing happens. But with acpi=off Ubuntu is booted from the USB flash drive, sadly, with 800x600 resolution. Anyway, I could easily install Ubuntu and after installation and rebooting the system I faced the same errors when booting from the SSD in which the Ubuntu was installed on. Now I gave up and switching back to 22.04 :-(, wait I can't! because I removed my 22.04.3 iso file and now I can't download it again because all 22.04 releases point to 24.04.4 which itself causes another error:
[...] DMAR: [Firmware Bug]: No firmware reserved region can cover this RMMR [...], contact BIOS vendor for fixes
[...] x86/cpu: SGX disabled by BIOS.
Tested with: Ubuntu 24.04, Kubuntu 24.04, Kubuntu 22.04.4 and KDE neon neon-user-20240502-0718 iso files.
System info:
ASUS N552VW, Latest BIOS release date: 2019/05/29, Processor: i7-6700HQ, Memory: 11.6 GiB of RAM, Graphics: NVIDIA 960m
References:
